Literary Theology • Ralph Ellison

Ralph Ellison and the Invisible Theology

Johanna Blanding-Koskinen • The Literary Apologetic

A man made invisible by America who surrounded himself with the number that means the wisdom of seeing — drawn from a tradition that had learned, across three thousand years, to mean more than it was permitted to say.

From Oklahoma to the Underground

Ralph Waldo Ellison (1913–1994) was born in Oklahoma City, named after Ralph Waldo Emerson by a father who died when Ellison was three. He grew up in a household where books were taken seriously, studied music at Tuskegee Institute, and came to New York in 1936 where he fell into the orbit of Richard Wright and the Harlem literary world.

He began work on Invisible Man in 1945 and published it in 1952 — the same year Paul Tillich published The Courage to Be, Reinhold Niebuhr published The Irony of American History, and Perry Miller delivered the lectures that would become Errand into the Wilderness. The novel won the National Book Award in 1953 and has never gone out of print.

Ellison rejected every offer to adapt Invisible Man for film or stage, including one from Quincy Jones, and prohibited dramatic adaptations in his will for as long as his wife survived him. Having watched what Hollywood did to Richard Wright’s Native Son, he understood that the architecture of the novel could not survive the transformation.

The Invisible Theology

M. Cooper Harriss, in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology (NYU Press, 2017), documented what most Ellison scholarship had missed: that Ellison was in sustained intellectual dialogue with mid-century Protestant theology throughout his career, particularly through his close friendship with the theologian and literary critic Nathan A. Scott Jr. Harriss places Ellison in conversation with Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Martin Luther King Jr., and argues that the theological pressure in Invisible Man is structural to the novel.

The novel’s opening grounds the narrator’s moral claim not in his accomplishments or social position but in his creatureliness: the bare fact of his material existence as a human being. This is the grammar of the imago Dei doctrine: dignity inheres in what a human being is, not in what others are willing to acknowledge about what a human being is.

The underground space of the prologue — illuminated by 1,369 light bulbs siphoned from Monopolated Light and Power — encodes this claim arithmetically. 1,369 is 37 squared. In the ordinal gematria of the Hebrew tradition Ellison acknowledged as a source of Black American language and imagination, 37 is the numerical value of chokmah, the Hebrew word for wisdom — associated in Kabbalistic tradition specifically with the sense of sight. A man made invisible by America surrounds himself with the number that means the wisdom of seeing.

“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” — Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952

Ellison and the Hidden Architecture

TLA’s argument about Ellison, developed at length in Hidden Architecture, is that Invisible Man’s moral force depends entirely on a claim the novel never argues for: that the narrator possesses a dignity prior to and independent of social recognition. Without that claim, his condition is a descriptive fact about power relations rather than a fundamental injustice.

The 1,369 lights are a Passover act: encoded significance, invisible to the institution that would destroy it if it could see it, visible to anyone who knows the tradition well enough to read the number. The tradition Ellison draws on had learned, across three thousand years, to mean more than it was permitted to say — and Ellison, in his underground room, joins it.

Principal Works

  • Invisible Man – 1952 – National Book Award
  • Shadow and Act (essays) – 1964
  • Going to the Territory (essays) – 1986
  • Juneteenth (posthumous) – 1999
  • Three Days Before the Shooting… (posthumous) – 2010
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